Monday, February 11, 2008

7 tips on MySpaceMusic marketing

MySpaceMusic is where you need to be if you're a musician or have a band.

This is the primary networking and promotional website for all kinds of music and music-related products, like record labels, DJs, etc. You can jump in ignorantly, make a fool of yourself, and alienate all your potential mentors and fans, or you can be smart.

Here are 7 tips on how to successfully market your music on MySpaceMusic.

(1) Avatar: MySpaceMusicSelect an image that conveys what style your music is, and add your band name to it.

Rock bands can show an electric guitar, folk bands an acoustic guitar, jazz bands a saxophone, blues bands a harmonica, techno bands a synthesizer. Or, more abstractly, an electronic band might use a science fiction image, while a country band might use a farm house.

Add your name or band name to the image, for quicker recognition, and for those sites that use background colors that obliterate the text (in this case, the name that appears right on top of your avatar.)

When a page takes over 10 seconds to load, I bail out and move on to another band. Keep your images optimized for web display, which means a small file size and a small display size. This is not an art gallery.

People arrive at your page to listen your music, and maybe learn a little about you -- but not to view huge splashy artwork that often makes no sense. Clutter is always bad for any website.

Display a few show posters announcing where you have performed recently. Show some CD covers or other associated artwork. But don't go crazy with all the big boring posters.

You surely have 6 songs you can share with the fans, right? The maximum number of songs you can put on a MySpaceMusic player is 6, so fill it up.

If I have to explain, again, why you must enable free downloads of your music, I'm going to go nuts. Free produces paid.

Unless you're a famous musician, you need tons of exposure. Free music downloads will get your music out there, in iPods and burned to CDs. Hook them with the free songs, so they'll come back and want more, at any reasonable price. Appeal to the collector mentality fans.

Automatic playing of music on a website sucks...unless it's MySpaceMusic. This is the one exception that I know of: fans expect a band's page to automatically play music. They may be zipping through band pages, and if they don't hear any music coming from your page, that means they have to click Play. But they'll probably just click to the next band.

A music player that doesn't automatically play a song---seems----dead.

Configure your music player to play your best song, not a randomized selection from your 6 song playlist. That way every new visitor will hear your best song, and your total hits for that best song will accumulate rapidly.

Create a special image for each song in your music player, or show the cover of the CD that the song is found on. The title of the song should be worked into the image.

(4) Bio/About: If your band has a history that fans will find interesting, provide it. If not, be silly.

It's boring to read lengthy press release type hype. Keep your Bio/About brief and be comical about it if you can. An anti-bio can work in music marketing, not being rude, but enigmatic, playful, or offbeat.

My critically unacclaimed "Winning Through Self-Loathing" methodology works here as it does everywhere: put yourself down, be confusing, deride and demote yourself, think Dethronement at all times.

Librarians band provides a good example of this, read the disparaging remarks they quote as negative testimonials in their About Librarians section.

[QUOTE]

Is this a joke? Imagine Gary Numan fronting Les Savy Fav. These guys did, and still it didn’t put them off making this plodding, lifeless bore.

-Harp Magazine

I listened to this while eating my dinner of eating pizza and drinking root beer. All I heard was some really annoying guitar.

I have changed my songs, deleting and adding and changing their order, and this may be a good strategy. If you have created some new songs, by all means put them up there, but leave one or two classics and let them accumulate hits long-term. That's my best advice for now.

I have added a Ning player to my page, so this provides my fans with around 50 extra songs to play and download free. I have never seen anyone else do this, although I see a lot of SnoCap paid download widgets. I'm opposed to paid mp3 downloads, for strategic reasons, so I don't use these widgets.

(6) Friends Requests: Find similar bands, avoid the spammer requests.

Don't automatically accept any Friends Requests. Go to their page and see if they're a real band, or just a spammer using a musical name and avatar to trick you. MySpaceMusic spam often consists of shitty ringtone ads, dating service ads, and such.

You can Edit Comments, so delete the spam comments, or, if you get a lot of spam, configure your settings so all comments are moderated and need approval prior to posting them.

Go to the MySpaceMusic pages of bands you like, or bands that are similar to your music. Click on Add as Friend, and also check out their Friends, many of whom may be similar to your music. You may discover some cool bands who are Friends of a band you already like.

(7) Posting Comments: Be careful! Use restraint!

Some bands disable HTML so you can't post any images or ads on their comments area.

Others allow cool abstract or surreal art, but no self-promotional ads or links.

Basic rule of thumb: if a band posted an image on your comments area, you can probably post an image on theirs. But for crying out loud, don't post huge sprawling images. What's the point? That's a stupid attempt to get attention.

Get attention by saying nice, specific things about the band. Tell them how long you've been a fan, which album or song is your favorite, how they have influenced or inspired you, things like that.

Don't say stupid hype stuff like "I added a new song. Check out my player!" or "Watch my new video and let me know what you think!" That type of comment just makes you look opportunistic and pathetic.

Don't use the other bands' MySpaceMusic pages to promote your music. Just post a nice remark or question or praise, and let that carry the weight of promotion. If your comment is intelligent and interesting, they and their fans may visit your page.

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS:

MySpaceMusic has down times, when the music player doesn't play, which often coincides with the profile editor acting screwy.

I've deleted about 5 photos tonight, vainly trying to eliminate some broken image code that renders as text. For some reason, when I delete an image, some of the code remains, which looks stupid. I'll have to wait until it's not so buggy, and try it again.

LEADING AUTHORITY:

Google "myspacemusic marketing" and this post you're reading right now comes up first. In the top 20 search results, you'll see about 8 or 12 posts by Vaspers or Str8 Sounds. I am the leading authority on both "blogocombat" and "myspacemusic marketing", according to Google.